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Do Audio Speakers Break-in?

audio2design

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And one final comment from me:
If running in takes so long and causing night and day difference, by no way it will just gets stable and be happily ever after.

A material will experience significant change with a few hundred hours of use won’t just magically stabilise itself and never change again. Much like a car engine after the initial wearing out of imperfections in metal processing you might get a bit smoother but after that the engine is constantly degrading. So if a speaker change drastically after a few hundred hours. You at max have another fee hundred hours to enjoy and it will goes very off sounding again. Does that make sense?

Somewhere there is an AES paper on exactly this :)
 

YSC

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If you don’t believe in speaker break in…simply buy Tannoy speakers. That will scare you to death. A bonus is that you’ll also break in your underwear at the same time.
Er… I have to say quite some members who doesn’t believe in audible break in owns or had owned some tannoy, yet they don’t believe in break in also. Please show proofs and not only claims
 

Sandthemall

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Why can't there be proof shown that break in doesn't happen? That sounds more compelling to me. I saw a 'graph' that showed little difference at 2 hours of playing...this is not a very useful study. There needs to be proof of this with minute/hourly/daily/weekly/monthly results across various speaker brands.

There are simply too many people that believe break in happens. So naturally burden of proof is on nay sayers.

So your ball. And good luck!
 

BDWoody

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Sandthemall

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This is very much like saying ball bearings and bearing races don't break in after showing a 2 hour study. It's a dynamic mechanical structure. Change is simply inevitable. It's a fact of life on planet earth.

The real questions are:
How much change actually happens?
Is it noticeable?
Which types of speakers exhibited the most/least change?

Otherwise this is a silly debate.

My anecdotal experience is that speakers with hard surrounds sound noticeably difference after break in.

Maybe some here don't have good hearing or lack a high resolution system.

I know when I started in the hobby all this sounded silly but as my systems became more resolving, these differences were rather discernable.
 

BDWoody

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sarumbear

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audio2design

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My anecdotal experience is that speakers with hard surrounds sound noticeably difference after break in.

Maybe some here don't have good hearing or lack a high resolution system.

I know when I started in the hobby all this sounded silly but as my systems became more resolving, these differences were rather discernable.

On a trolling scale, I would give this 2/10 for at least a modicum of effort.

This may pass as evidence on Audiogon, but here, it just passes for gas.


p.s. my experience is that most systems that audiophiles consider "resolving" really are not, at least not any more resolving than something much cheaper. Your source isn't more resolving than something that costs $200 (coupled with some basic streamer). Your amplifier is not more resolving than something that costs $1000-1500 (except perhaps at very high levels). Please don't even bring up cables. Just do not. Maybe you do have some very good speakers, but some reasonable good speakers have pretty good distortion characteristics at reasonable volumes. That leaves your room, and 95% of so called "audiophiles" have abominations for listening spaces (by resolving standards).

SO? ... Just what is so resolving about your system?
 

Spkrdctr

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The graph of the excursion appears to match work I did a long time ago though we were not measuring this parameter we were measuring cone break up. Looking at the shape of the graph I would estimate that linearity would experience some improvement over time and hence distortion would drop. Would it be audible? That's the big question.

I will go out on a limb and say NO. But then I'm feeling risky today.
 

audio2design

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This guy is a loudspeaker design legend and begs to differ.

http://www.gr-research.com/burnin.htm

Updated link: https://www.gr-research.com/driver-burn-in.html

A legend in his own mind .....


Danny is a good tinkerer, but lacks fundamental background knowledge hence why he makes claims that are simply not true. His measurements of the speaker appear to be true, but as noted many times here, the actual effect on an enclosed driver, i.e. a speaker, will be very small.


 

Spkrdctr

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On a trolling scale, I would give this 2/10 for at least a modicum of effort.
This may pass as evidence on Audiogon, but here, it just passes for gas.

Please don't even bring up cables. Just do not. Maybe you do have some very good speakers, but some reasonable good speakers have pretty good distortion characteristics at reasonable volumes. That leaves your room, and 95% of so called "audiophiles" have abominations for listening spaces (by resolving standards).
I say a big resounding YES! The rooms of "most" audiophiles are terrible and will not pass muster compared to a basic lower middle class living room. High enders have houses and rooms that are beautiful to look at and would not ever think of destroying "the look" of the beautiful house with room treatments and such. Easier to just buy more expensive speakers, fooling themselves that they are improving the sound by spending more money. So much, so wrong with home audio. Little by little this site cuts through the BS and lies. :)
 

Spkrdctr

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I have defended Danny at GR Research before on this forum. I have to say after the last 6 months, I can no longer do that. He has gone full on crazy and lacks any scientific proof of his many claims. He makes things up to sell product. He makes numerous claims that this little item in the signal path will make a big difference, when I know it will make no difference. All of the stuff that makes a big difference is exactly what he sells. I would like him to take and redo the crossover to flatten it out using the same cheap caps, inductors and resistors that come with the speakers. I bet $1000 he could not tell the difference between his high end and cheap crossover if the values are all the same. As usual, and I mean usual, even on this site, many people confuse a measured difference with an oscilloscope as being important (not talking about stacking tolerances which is real) when in reality it will never, ever be audible to a human. He does this in spades. thinking a more expensive inductor/cap/resistor will make a big audible difference. I say BS. He does redo crossovers and many times fixes serious problems. But, it doesn't have to be done with high end audiophile expensive components.
 

Spkrdctr

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@NTK has already provided a lot of information with his post, but I know that some here on the forum consider any information in which the word "Toole" appears to be baised - therefore, a few more details.

First of all, how big are the manufacturing fluctuations in the production of drivers?
These can sometimes be high, as the measurements from audioexpress.com show with this 250€ woofer from Seas:
View attachment 159780
As can be seen, the deviations of the resonance frequency in the TSP data for individual driver samples are 10-15%. This is consistent with the data from other manufacturers.

So then let's compare how big the difference is from "freshly unpacked" to "ran the woofer hard for 20h" and give only a few hours of rest (if Danny had rested the woofer for 48h, the TSP data might have changed again).
Here is the TSP data determined by GR-research:
View attachment 159770 View attachment 159761
The deviations in the resonance frequency are about 10-15% for the two extreme states (no break-in, full break-in).

What immediately stands out about the GR-research article? Exactly, no frequency response, distortion or waterfall measurements of the driver to show the effects of the different TSP data.

Then let's catch up and simulate the effects of these changes for the driver in a sealed enclosure. First, a sealed enclosure is simulated with the freshly unwrapped driver, and then the same enclosure is simulated with the full break-in driver.
Both frequency response and impedance response simulations are superimposed to make the differences as easy to see as possible:
View attachment 159773

Nice to see, the TSP data changes have no effect on the frequency response at all and thus do not cause any tonal change.

The article provides zero information on possibly sound-relevant parameters - no measurement on distortion, no measurement on decay, no frequency response measurement.
And the information the article provides shows literally zero tonal impact as the simulation shows.

As I say ad nauseum around here, it is not audible. But it is measurable! Great post showing how insignificant the difference is. But all snake oil takes something and exaggerates it by 1000 to sell that pet rock, platter stabilizer and electron aligner.
 

Spkrdctr

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I too was flabbergasted and gobsmacked at that post. I can't even respond. It is just too far to get to where I would need to go when starting at zero. Someone else might do it though.
 
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YSC

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This is very much like saying ball bearings and bearing races don't break in after showing a 2 hour study. It's a dynamic mechanical structure. Change is simply inevitable. It's a fact of life on planet earth.

The real questions are:
How much change actually happens?
Is it noticeable?
Which types of speakers exhibited the most/least change?

Otherwise this is a silly debate.

My anecdotal experience is that speakers with hard surrounds sound noticeably difference after break in.

Maybe some here don't have good hearing or lack a high resolution system.

I know when I started in the hobby all this sounded silly but as my systems became more resolving, these differences were rather discernable.
well, beside the results shown by amirm, the various research papers linked in this post already showed that running the speaker for a long break in period didn't show anything noticeable, yet one very noticeable effect is Relative humidity, temperature and level of noise in the background!

you can see the temp difference significantly affecting the bass response of the Neumann KH80DSP, which is much, much more than any break in of drivers measurement ever shown! and personally when in a very hot summer day where I turned on my noisy air conditioner, my genelec setup sounded bass muted coz the air cond is rumbling with low frequiencies, but now when autumn comes I feels the bass is very full with the room gain of around 6db at 25hz compared to 1khz!

I would say I believe more on the night and day difference are due to these but not the breaking in of a speaker!

bearings showed better difference as of a piston engine because they are something grinding through each other which of course grinds out the imperfections, not with speakers which is some basic piston movement with the voice coil. more so in sensible volume the excursion of drivers never goes anywhere near to permanently change the physical properties of the material!

I would say you are trying to looking at an old engine and said the steel property have changed in hardness or so, but not the smoothness change in normal mechanical wear!

if your theory is right, tell me why after a hundred hour or so why the driver suddenly never changes again? or never goes bad and become a horrid speaker?
 
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